Anthony in Good’ol Blighty has built an Automated Recording Unit Pi (ARUPI) for recording Soundscapes in Ecology research. He’s created a detailed Instructable that shows how he’s built it.

ARUPI – A Remote Soundscape Recorder

An ARUPI can be used to :

monitor the birds in your garden or just to make nice recordings of the dawn chorus, without having to get up really early

It’s built around a battery-powered Raspberry Pi A+ and a USB Soundblaster with microphone to record the sounds. A Sleepy Pi is used to optimise the battery consumption and wake the system up at predefined times, record the sounds, and then shutdown again to conserve the battery. All this is packaged up into a ruggedised enclosure.

The original units have been out in the field now for a couple of months in an area of Outstanding Natural Beauty collecting and storing the Soundscapes.